To Quito, Monday 21 August
The Colombian frontier officials are polite, helpful and humorous. I have been warned of Ecuadorian officialdom. I have been told to expect endless delays and endless tiresomeness. I draw up at the customs post. The tall uniformed customs man who approaches is a travel fantasist. He wants details of my trip. What had I enjoyed most? What were the disappointments, the scares? We chat. A second uniform joins us. The first accompanies me to a window to have the import papers for the bike completed. The inspector shows me where the engine and chassis numbers are on the Honda – something I ought to know.
At immigration I fall in with a group of Ecuadorians heading for a salsa fest in Cali and a young Scottish couple with whom I chat of the similarities we have found between these uplands and the Scottish Borders. This is the first time I have spoken English since Ming left Cartagena.
I had expected a minimum of two hours at the border. I am through in one, much of which is taken up with travel rap and advice. My guide-book warns of a police post outside the next town and that drivers should have their papers ready. I approach the police post. The policeman grins and waves me through. And something has happened. I am feeling insanely pleased. Insane because I am trembling with cold and a steady drizzle stings my cheeks.
The road has climbed from the frontier. Cloud covers the hilltops. Visibility is poor. Why am I feeling pleased? Sure, the hills are familiar. I could show my brother a photograph and he would presume that I had been in the Cheviots. However, there is something new, something really cheering. It takes me a while, maybe a few kilometres. Then suddenly I understand. Ecuador has hedges.
I ride into the capital, Quito, in the evening. I find a big room with an angled view across the square to the church of Santo Domingo. From my bed I can see a massive statue of the Virgin that watches over the city from a hilltop. The water in the shower is hot and the shower has a shower rose. I have internet in the hotel.
Quito enthrals me. I spend two days revelling in tourist things. I walk the historic quarter, visit half a dozen museums and a dozen churches. Highlights? The Chapel of the Rosary in Santo Domingo. Disappointments? The Jesuit temple.
The Chapel of the Rosary is a place of prayer through which tourists tiptoe. The Jesuit temple is a museum in which the rare religious tiptoe among the tourists.
The refectory in the monastery of Santo Domingo is an essential visit. The walls are panelled with portraits of friars in their moments of martyrdom. Roasted, beheaded, stabbed, strangled, stretched – it is all up there on the walls, great decor to admire while eating dinner. My favourite is the monk forced to eat his own eyes.
The carved wood ceiling in the choir loft at the Church of San Francisco is superb. So are the ceramics at the Museo Nacional del Banco Central in the New City. The layout of the exhibits is exceptional – surely one of the great museums of the Americas. Some of the ceramics and the oil painting on alabaster in the Museo de San Francisco possess an amazing luminosity.
Ghastly are the paintings in the 1920s mansion of the heiress Maria Augusta Urrutia. Noted for her charitable works, her weirdest act of charity was in supporting an Ecuadorian artist whose vast paintings are a mix of pre-Raphaelite without talent and worse art nouveau. The architecture is little better, the patios are mean and the house lacks a single comfortable chair.
Moto Andes service the Honda – oil change, brakes, chain tension, etcetera. The chief mechanic shows me how to set the valves and clean the petrol filter. They bill me seventeen dollars.
I forget my backpack in a workman’s restaurant. I return to find it stored in safety on top of a cupboard. Ah, those thieving natives!
I enjoy female companionship, an Ecuadorian, a professor of Spanish. She is a woman of my age or older. Dark spectacles protect her eyes and she is neatly dressed in matching woollens and proper shoes. We meet because I hold a church door open for her. Together, we visit two churches and two museums. She asks my nationality and whether I am Catholic. I reply that yes, I am Catholic and that I am English. It is an easy answer.
The truth is far more complex. In the solitude of this journey, riding a bike day after day through strange territory, often feeling my years, I have thought much of what I am and what I have made of myself. I am a writer – that first and foremost. By culture, I am Catholic. I admire that pre-Conquest fusion of Spanish Catholicism and Spanish Islam that reached its architectural summit in the Americas. In my youth this admiration drew me to the Sufi tradition of Islamic mysticism. I am a European with roots deep in the soil of Worcestershire and Herefordshire, and yet I often feel more at ease in the French language. I feel a great affinity with and admiration for the Spain of my Spanish forefathers, the Spain of the Conquest, and I feel at home here in Hispanic America. So there you have it: in every sense, a mestizo.
Guidebooks can wreck a trip with their warnings of danger. So can hotel staff. My advice? Ask a cop.
The cops in the historic quarter of Quito mostly come armed with Rottweilers. We were presented with a Rottweiler as protection when living in the Dominican Republic. I warned my son Jed, aged three at the time, that the Rottweiler was not a play dog. Jed mounted astride the poor beast and bashed it over the head with a coconut.
Unsurprisingly, the beast looked stunned.
I recount this tale to a cop. He grins and says, yes, Rottweilers are in truth big softies. As to walking after dark, the cop advises, ‘Not alone or late at night’ – a warning applicable to most big cities.
I dine in an upmarket restaurant by the cathedral and walk an hour. The food is excellent, a salad of heart of palm, fresh asparagus, avocado and the normal greens and reds. Next comes a fat fillet of fish in caper sauce. The manager passes by and asks whether everything is in order. I look down at my plate wiped clean with garlic bread and we both laugh. As to the great churches and monasteries of the city, they are superb and lit brilliantly, domes and spires pure magic against the night sky.
The United States inherited nothing of equivalent cultural importance from the Founding Fathers. Even the tale of a few witch burnings appears minor when compared with a friar forced to eat his own eyes. Less you suspect me of being anti the USA, the Founding Fathers were Brits – as I have been reminded more than once by Hispanic Americans on this journey. I have also been reminded that every Conquistador married an indigenous woman, while neither the Founding Fathers nor their descendants have ever mixed.
The Route to Baños, Thursday 24 August
Ecuador is on the equator. In my subconscious, I equate the equator with sweat, sunburn and mosquitoes. I am riding towards an erupting volcano spewing white-hot pumice. Definitely warm. I wear a thick shirt, three undershirts and a sweater, long johns and thick chinos, a bright-blue rain suit. Reasonable protection?
Not even halfway to reasonable.
I am riding at seventy kilometres an hour into a head wind. I wear a bright-blue suit bought in Bugo, Colombia, in the hope that it would prove miraculous. My gloves are too short in the wrist to overlap the cuffs of the jacket. The wind races straight up my sleeves. It is a vicious wind. God knows from whence it blows. Probably off some ice-bound mountain of which Ecuador suffers a surfeit. Ah, yes, and another point: I am crossing a fell with the road peaking at 3400 metres. Take the highest mountain in the United Kingdom, triple it and subtract a smidgen. This is the type of idiotic sum I do to stop dwelling on how cold I am.
How cold am I? Freezing.
I am heading for Latacunga, eighty kilometres south of Quito.
Latacunga is down a few metres.
Latacunga is cold. A pair of nice cops tell me to park my bike up against theirs in the no-parking zone on the main square. The garden in the centre of the square is beautiful, complex and immaculately maintained. The interior of the cathedral is austere. The colonial mansion of the Marquises of Miraflores is built of grey volcanic stone. The mansion has been restored and opened to the public. The restorers have done a great job. Imagine a downmarket theme restaurant for the Party elite in the old Soviet Union.
I ride serenely downhill towards the hot springs resort of Baños when a truck driver nearly kills me. The driver is racing another truck. The two trucks race abreast on a road narrowed by a drift of fine volcanic sand bordering the curb. Brake hard in the sand and the bike will slide. The truck misses me by less than a metre. Son of a bitch. May he die a painful and inglorious death.
I am presumptuous in complaining of a solitary near-death experience. The volcano, Tungurahua, has spent the past few months attempting to kill the citizens of Baños. The volcano has done a fine job in killing the resort’s economy. This is high season and the town is empty bar a few volcano watchers and the usual dimwits who never watch TV news or read a paper. Of which category am I? Take your pick.
Baños is a small town and sits on a ledge near the bottom of a river gorge. The volcanoes that surround it are up close. Tungurahua is the tallest and the nearest. I pass men clearing pumice and boulders from the road on my descent into town. I have been half-frozen earlier in the day and came close to being killed by an over-testicled truck driver. Now I find myself in a dump. Baños has an ugly church and two nondescript squares with nondescript gardens and a rash of mini-hotels. Most buildings are in the process of gaining a new level or have owners who contemplate a future of further levels. The new levels require vertical steel reinforcing rods. With all this uncloaked reinforcing, you have a metallic porcupine. Most shops are small and sell similar hand-knitted items of indigenous tat. Restaurants are in overabundance, few evidence any taste in decor. Nor am I enthused by whole peeled guinea-pigs cooking on pavement barbecues. Add scores of tour agencies all advertising on scruffy billboards the same hells: white-water rafting, volcano scaling, jungle treks, swami searches, biking, quad biking, enduro-biking, horseback riding and every kind of massage and bath, and you have a picture common to such dumps, a picture I could do without.
I find a hotel owned by a Frenchman. The Frenchman hasn’t visited in a while. A charming and very pretty receptionist tells me that the Frenchman is scared of the volcano. She shows me a great room that has a table in a big window. The window gives onto two non-exploding volcanoes. The exploder is to our rear. The room has an ample bathroom. The water is piping hot. I thaw and feel better, more optimistic. I walk the town and am met by a mirage: a sign above a small restaurant announces LA CUISINE DE PROVENCE.
Surely not?
I push open the door. The man sitting at the table in front of the small bar is unmistakably French. He is fair-haired, middle-aged and chubby – as are most chefs (other than the dieting stars of television). Six o’clock in the evening and he has been at the stove since midday. Now is his hour of relaxation before the dinner clientele arrive. He offers me a glass of a good red wine from Chile. I feel at home. We chat.
Marianne’s has been open fifteen years. The owners are a local family adopted by Michel. Marianne is the mother figure. The restaurant has twelve tables. Decoration is mostly framed cartoons from the twenties. The menu is simple: salads, two soups, pasta, steak au poivre, daube, boeuf à la marocain and three desserts.
I return at eight and order the steak au poivre. Michel has taught a local slaughterer the arts of a French butcher and the steak is the first truly tender cut of beef that I have eaten on this trip.
A Spaniard asks to share my table. A salesman in his late twenties, he is Catalan and from Barcelona. He is at the end of a five-week vacation. He hates Ecuador. The people see a foreigner, they eat him (slang for overcharging). I reply that I must be privileged in being old, that Latin Americans care for the aged.
The Catalan eats crudely a vast plate of spaghetti, drinks bottled water. I ask for a second glass of wine.
The Catalan calls for his bill with neither please nor thankyou. The bill comes and he grimaces. ‘Five dollars for a spaghetti.’
I say, ‘You can eat at a comedor, a dollar fifty’.
‘I can’t eat that shit.’ He stuffs his wallet back in his trouser pocket and departs.
Two local musicians perform music of the Andes. The atmosphere is friendly, the people good-natured. I sip a third glass of wine.
Back on the street, I clean my spectacles. I notice flames way up above the town. Tungurahua is erupting. I replace my spectacles and discover that I am looking in the wrong direction at the wrong volcano. The flames are a crucifix of electric lights. Baños remains a dump – it is a very pleasant dump.
Baños, Friday 25 August
This morning I chat with a woman tour operator two doors up from the hotel. She has two German clients for a half-day of white-water rafting tomorrow. She requires six. She doubts whether there are six tourists in Baños. The town exists on tourism. The town is dying. The Iraq war, the Israeli destruction of Lebanon and the price of oil cause anxiety. Add fear of terrorism. Then comes the final whammy: TV coverage of Tungurahua in eruption and refugees fleeing from their farms on the upper slopes.
A gentle rain from heaven?
Not too unpleasant if you have an umbrella, are holding hands with your sweetheart and expect to be sharing his or her bed soon.
A rain of boulders is different. Boulders aren’t romantic. Nor is a great big volcano spewing lava at your hotel bedroom window. You don’t want to get in bed. You want to get in your car and get the hell out of wherever all this threatening stuff is happening. As for voluntarily visiting such a place, no thanks.
However, I am in Baños and I have developed a weird loyalty to the dump. Very weird. Although not so weird as to risk my life white-water rafting. This is where being in your seventies is useful. You can refuse such offers without appearing rude.
A young and unreasonably beautiful blonde lady approaches me on Main Street. She asks whether I speak Spanish.
I say, ‘More or less.’
She asks how long have I been in Baños and how long do I intend staying and doesn’t the volcano frighten me?
‘Not a bit,’ I boast, playing the masculine hero. What could a little-bitty volcano do to a real man? Or to an unreasonably pretty young blonde lady who is under the protection of such man?
She asks me to repeat all this for Latin American cable TV.
‘Sure,’ I say. ‘Delighted to be of help.’ Both to her and to Baños.
I add a few embellishments for the camera: the great restaurants, the mountain walks (across white-hot ashes?), white-water rafting.
I have impressed her. ‘You white-water raft? At your age?’
‘Absolutely,’ I say. ‘Going tomorrow. River is in great shape.’
This is the movies. I am on camera. It is not for real. And it is for the unreasonably beautiful young blonde lady. To impress her.
Half the town watches the interview. It is broadcast at midday and on the six o’clock news. The woman tour operator two doors up from the hotel sees it. She expresses her delight at my change of mind. She has two Canadians as well as the two Germans. With me, that makes five. Plus two girls staying in my hotel who still have to confirm.
What can I answer?
I try, ‘Is it safe for a man my age? You know, an old man with a heart condition? I don’t want to be a nuisance to the others.’
‘Do you take medication?’ asks the tour operator.
A ray of hope. ‘Absolutely. Four pills in the evening and one in the morning.’
‘Then that’s all right,’ says the tour operator. ‘That will be thirty dollars. Sign here.’
I eat once more at Marianne’s – last dinner for the condemned. I choose the daube. Delicious. And I learn more of Michel. His parents owned a vineyard and a small hotel in Burgundy. Michel wished to be a doctor. His father had doubts as to Michel’s aptitude. His terms for supporting Michel through his studies were that Michel also study hotel management and spend his vacations working in restaurant kitchens. Michel qualified but never practised. The father is dead. The hotel is sold. Michel’s mother keeps a watchful eye on the vineyard.
Baños, Saturday 26 August
A petard is something upon which you hoist yourself. Am I hoisted – or petarded? I am also suffering from palpitations. I should keep this a secret. Real men don’t suffer palpitations. Palpitations are a woman’s complaint. Women, being more sensible than men, take heed. They face whatever it is that gives them the palpitations and conclude, no. No, we won’t do that.
Were I a woman, I would not go white-water rafting. I am not referring here to any other woman: merely and specifically to the imaginary seventy-three-year-old woman I would be were I a woman. I would be suffering from palpitations and conclude that white-water rafting wasn’t my bag.
Uneasy with my own nervousness, I sit down to breakfast up on the hotel terrace and ask the two young women serving whether the volcano scares them.
They answer that they are scared but not very scared.
They might be offended were I to ask whether they suffer from palpitations. Anyway, I don’t know the Spanish equivalent and palpitation is difficult to portray in sign language without giving offence.
And of course there is nothing voluntary in their situation. Baños is their home. This is their job. Where would they go? What other work could they find?
While all I need say is: Actually I’ve changed my mind. Keep the thirty dollars.’
I sit on a bumpy sofa at the tour operator’s office. Two young physios working in London arrive. Next are a Canadian couple, sociology students. The woman is blonde and wears her hair in ringlets. I recognise her legs. They are of an attractive shape. However, what are recognisable are the bumps and bruises and scars. She is a suicide addict (she would blah on about extreme sports). Introduce her to my youngest son Jed, and they would relate immediately. They would get right into the scar game:
Yeah, that was the zone championship.
The track was met. I hit this tree.
Some idiot got in my may.
I didn’t see the cliff.
They have real cool ambulances.
Meanwhile we wait for the two Germans. Our guide for the day suggests that the Germans are tired; they were mountain biking yesterday and did this swing thing off a bridge. No, not bungee jumping. You wear a harness attached to a rope and dive way out from a bridge so that you swing in huge arcs.
‘Over what?’ I ask.
‘A canyon.’
‘With rocks?’
‘Of course, with rocks.’
Why would I go white-water rafting with maniacs?
The Germans are male nineteen-year-olds from Leipzig, the old East Germany. The guide is unaware of the teenager-imposed curfew on European teenagers rising before eleven and fetches them from their hotel. Alex will be studying politics at university. His partner in craziness studies football and hopes to be a history teacher – however, he goofed off at gymnasium and doubts whether his grades are acceptable. He has very white legs and has been collecting mosquito bites – the ones that are wet in the middle, yellowish at the edges and give pharmacists a warming scent of imminent profit.
We drive forty-five minutes in an open-sided truck with a rubber boat on the roof. The benches are fixed to cram in the maximum quantity of small indigenous Latin Americans. We are cramped sitting sideways.
I talk with the ringlet Canadian, Kay. She has given up extreme sports and has lost twenty pounds in muscle weight. I have lost sixteen pounds of pure fat. Kay has been taught the politically correct generalities of the Conquest: the Spaniards were evil; they destroyed the indigenous culture.
I remark that the indigenous culture was feudal. A clique of the most senior nobles served the king. Beneath came the senior provincial nobles and a layer of lesser nobles. Nobles didn’t work. Non-nobles worked their butts off. Conquistadors came of a feudal system. They came at best from the lower strata of lesser nobles. In America, they married the daughters of the most senior nobles – advancement closed to them back home. No one weeps for the destruction of the feudal system in Europe. Few weep for the fall of Soviet feudalism. The Conquistadors should be criticised for maintaining the feudal culture. Many of those with education (mostly friars) did precisely that.
We head down a dirt track to a wooden bridge. The truck is too big to cross the bridge. The rubber boat is transferred to a pickup. The pickup crosses the bridge and disappears into the jungle. We cross on foot. The three women take the lead. Absolved of responsibility, we men trail along in their tracks and discuss serious matters – mostly football, the World Cup. We walk and we walk – maybe a mile uphill before the pickup catches us. The pickup had turned down a side track through trees immediately on crossing the bridge. Our fearless leader was too dumb to leave one of his assistants at the turning. And we men, of course, were merely following the women. While the women were being real men and striding on ahead. This is not a good beginning.
Our guide is in his forties, a short man with a belly. He has learnt the white-water instructor spiel in English. He can instruct: how to paddle, when to paddle, when to stop paddling, and he tells us never, never, ever to let go of our paddles. He instructs us in what to do if we fall in the water (lie on our backs); what to do if someone else falls in the water. And he shouts a good deal at the footballing German – I suspect because the German is the biggest member of our party and shouting at him reassures our small guide as to his own importance.
I help lift the raft into the river. People get in the side opposite me. This forces the raft my way. My paddle is under the raft – I have hold of the handle. Our guide yells at me to board. I yell back that my paddle is under the raft. He shouts at me to get in. I repeat that my paddle is under the raft. He screeches again. At which point I realise that he speaks the minimum necessary English. His understanding of the language is zero. So I shout at him in Spanish that he is a c— and that my paddle is under the raft.
The message reaches his brain. He pushes the raft out from the beach and my paddle is free. I board the raft. He gets in behind me. He says, in Spanish, that he’s sorry for the misunderstanding. I say that that’s fine, just so long as he doesn’t drown me. He promises not to drown me. Good. We are making progress.
I am an old man. I have little fear of death. I fear being unable to cope. Paddling is easy. We hit the first rapid. Waves ram the blunt bow of the raft upward. Spray soaks us. I have a sudden memory of whizzing downriver in Kenya on truck tyres. A hydrologist, Basil Bell, was measuring the river’s water flow. The local witchdoctor demanded that Basil buy a goat to sacrifice to the river. The goat belonged to the witchdoctor. I was twenty-one years old. This memory shoots us through the first rapid and I am having fun. More than fun – this is glorious.
We high-five our paddles and whack the blades in the water. We hit the next rapid. The waves are bigger. No problem. Alex and I are the rafting virgins. We grin and smack hands. I have found a sport that old men can enjoy. The river spits us out of the canyon, jungle on both sides. We swing close to the bank, orchids on the trees, a couple of optimistic vultures overhead. Yes, this is great.
More rapids, more high-fiving, shouts of exultation. Our guide orders us to paddle standing. Standing on a raft is not for old men. I have sufficient difficulty standing upright on dry land.
I return from the river to the hotel. Ming’s Monster is parked beside the Honda. Ming is resting. I wake him and we recount our adventures. We eat at Marianne’s with the two Germans and the two Canadians of my rafting trip. I order the Moroccan chicken. The other five order steak au poivre. Perfect.
Baños, Sunday 27 August
My Catholic and Spanish heritage pursues me. We ride today to a farm that Michel owned and sold to a Swiss. Michel is resting there a week. The farm is three miles down a dirt track. The track is new. Before the track, transport was by foot or mule or moke.
A foreign priest owned the farm and five foreign priests established a community there. A priestly cousin invited Michel to run a pharmacy at the entrance to the farm. The Versailles branch of the Knights of Malta donated the pharmaceuticals. Here is the heritage: my grandfather and my father were Knights, my brother is a Knight.
Insect bites did for the community – or a shaman.
Michel’s cousin bought the farm and later sold it to Michel.
The present owner, the Swiss, has let the place go to ruin.
Ming and I climb with Michel up a steep hill and across a field of rushes to the community’s church. The church is built of wood. It is narrow and has a steep roof and a small steeple. Steps lead up the back to what was the community’s library and study room. The leader of the community lived in a house a further hundred metres or so beyond the church – until the bugs got him. Now the bugs devour his house and the church.
The field is edged by jungle. We walk in among the trees a little way and disturb a wild boar. Then we walk back down the hill to what was the dispensary and which Michel converted into a home. The terrace is ample. We sit at a wood table and eat too much and share two bottles of wine. The ex-dispensary has a good feel and Michel is a good kind man. The hill and the church and the gone community are different. Both Ming and I were disturbed up on the hill. We want to know more. Asking Michel seems impolite and dangerously intrusive.
On the ride back from the farm we see Tungurahua. The top of the volcano and the lower slopes are in cloud. The evening sun strikes the centre section. The effect is surprising, a giant sponge pudding streaked in icing sugar and chocolate. The river runs black with lava through the sluice gates at the hydroelectric station. Spray carries the stink of sulphur. Ming stops to photograph. I yell at him to keep going, not to inhale.
I am going to die, Monday 28 August
I wake at four and throw up. I throw up at half past four and at five and at half past five and at six. Mostly I control the direction and keep cleaning to a minimum.
Ming wakes me for breakfast at half past seven. I groan. He brings me a bottle of water and a glass of orange juice – my request. The juice is a disaster – although it completes the purging of my belly. The bug moves to my bowels. I become a rectal water pistol. Ming brings me antibiotics.
I don’t want to die in Baños.
I want to go home.
Baños to Cuenca, Tuesday 29 August
I am recovered. Whatever was in my belly and bowels has been evacuated – totally. We leave Baños and ride across the Altiplano. The country is green and Scottish Borders. The hills to our right are streaked with snow. To our left, Tungurahua and its mates are blanketed in cloud. I brake and wait while a family crosses the road. The mother leads a black and white Friesian cow. Two small boys herd two black pigs with fawn snouts. A daughter and shaggy donkey bring up the rear. The mother wears a dark-green felt hat and a red jumper beneath a tweed coat. I raise a gloved hand in greeting and she gives me a big grin.
The land changes. The soil is grey and thin and over-farmed. Houses are small. Erosion scars the hillsides. Contour planting and contour ploughing would help – or building terraces. We ride through cloud. The women wear white festive bowler hats.
Later we are back into green uplands and dairy farms and large two-storey houses and felt hats. Is there a connection between white bowlers and poor land?
In Cuenca we find a hotel converted from a colonial house. We have rooms opening onto the rear patio. The water is hot. We have ridden across the Andes.
Cuenca, Wednesday 30 August
Ming has the bug. He threw up during the night. Now he lies curled up in bed, miserable and waif-like. I fetch him fresh yoghurt. I then attend early Mass in Cuenca’s new cathedral. Completed in the 1890s, it is a great building. The architect was German. I am amazed always by the courage and confidence of designers of great buildings. How can they be certain of the outcome? And the arrogance of architects of the massive mediocre – to so blight the cityscape.
The two young Canadians of my rafting are studying in Cuenca and live with host families. They fetch me from the hotel and take me to their favourite coffeehouse. The coffeehouse is warm. Bliss. Kay is a mixture of openness and enthusiasm and innocence. Tyler is both more watchful and thoughtful, and he has that quietness that is common to many Canadians and that differentiates them from their cross-border cousins.
As in Quito, the main museum in Cuenca is financed by the Central Bank. The bank has kept the best for Quito. There is an archaeological park that demonstrates the strata of building. I meet a German fund manager. We sit on a bench in the park in the sunshine and admire an elderly workman building a new ruin. Later I say to the workman, ‘Working as in the old days.’
He grins and says, ‘Much slower now.’
The fund manger was in Quito with his girlfriend. She wanted to go to the beach, he to Cuenca. They have separated for a few days. Later we meet a family from Virginia. The parents have taken their three children out of school for a year to journey round the world. The children are about seven, nine and thirteen. The two youngest are girls. The fund manger and his girlfriend are on a short break and disagreed on where to go. Imagine the arguments in this family. The parents are magnificent in their bravery – or crazy.
My stomach is acting up again. I take Ming a banana yoghurt, eat one myself and am in bed at seven thirty. I lie in bed much of the night wondering whether to throw up. Throwing up would eject my heart medication. Should I throw up and take more pills or not throw up and listen to my belly rumble and bubble?
I doze and a mosquito bites me. The bite is the size of a United States Treasury one-cent piece. I switch on the light and mount a major but unsuccessful mosquito hunt. I switch off the light and doze briefly. The mosquito gets me. He is silent now. Perhaps he is merely sated. Or he may have caught the bug that has made Ming and me throw up – a cheering thought.
Do mosquitoes throw up?
Cuenca, Thursday 31 August
Ming and I were due out of Cuenca this morning. We both feel vomity and decide to give Cuenca a further day. I sit in the new cathedral a while. The side chapels are simply altars rather than walled enclosures. The space remains intact. The high altar is covered by a great golden canopy supported on four golden pillars. I am an addict of early Spanish colonial architecture. I praise a modern cathedral to prove my lack of bias. This cathedral is a space of prayer. I watch people enter, cross themselves, kneel a while, depart. An indigenous matron doffs her high-crowned Panama hat and lays it on the kneeler. She wears a knee-length pink skirt with blue edging. She rises and I glimpse her between the marble pillars, a ballet dancer waiting in the wings. Once recognised, the memory encompasses other women, their short skirts bulked out by petticoats, hair braided in a single pigtail – Degas, of course – and admiring God’s creatures is a form of prayer.
I have my shoes polished. I am short of heart medication; Ming and I take a cab to a large pharmacy in the new city. The pharmacist diagnoses our suffering as a combination of food poisoning and altitude sickness. The altitude sickness should wear off in a few weeks. Gas is one of the symptoms. At altitude gas expands in your stomach and you continually break wind.
A few weeks of stomach gas? We are definitely out of here tomorrow. Aim to stop one night at Loja, a descent of 500 metres, followed the next day by the beach.
Meanwhile we sit in a café, belch, pass wind and watch the world pass. Ming sticks with soup. I risk a few mouthfuls of plain boiled white rice.
Writing of Degas and ballet dancers prompts a train of thought. Our hotel displays articles of indigenous art for sale. Two small paintings are appealing. My Canadian rafters know the painter. He is among the most prominent painters of indigenous art.
What is indigenous art?
I understand paintings painted by indigenous painters – although a genetic test might be necessary to prove the painter’s bloodline; otherwise an art gallery might be accused of fraud. As for indigenous art – surely paintings are simply paintings and are judged on their merits rather than their heritage. Perhaps I am being dumb – or difficult. However, I have a nagging sense that indigenous art is a term of condescension: they are different from us, you know? The natives. Simple chaps. Isn’t this painting cute?
Towards Peru, Friday 1 September
Today I discover bliss cruising the fells of southern Ecuador at eighty kilometres an hour on a 125 Honda pizza delivery bike. We are 11 000 feet above sea level on a broad ridge that stretches for forty kilometres. The sky is a patchwork of dark and white and brilliant blue. A stiff breeze chases shadow and sunlight across the road and through the tufted grass and scrub and down the valleys either side. The road dips and rises and curves and the view is forever in all directions. We meet a convoy of gravel trucks. The drivers see this old bearded foreign man on a small, heavily burdened bike and they wave out the window and honk and flash their lights. That friendship of the road does for me. I weep with happiness – real tears.
Down a couple of thousand metres. Catamayo is Cuenca’s holiday resort. The people are jolly. I imagine that I am working for Catamayo’s tourist bureau. What else can I write to persuade travellers to stay a night? A restaurant is recommended as the best in town. The restaurant is full of local citizenry. We eat a third-rate churrasco. We stay at a nine-dollar-a-night resort hotel up a dirt track. The rooms look onto a roofless corridor that shares odours with an over-watered mushroom tunnel. The pool is clean. I swim. The water becomes less cold once you have been in a while. Ming forgoes the joys of the pool. People raised in Indonesia don’t do less cold. They do warm or they don’t do. We are eaten by mosquitoes.
To the Peruvian Border, Saturday 2 September
The direct road south from Catamayo to the Peruvian border passes though Carlamanga, a small pleasant town where we breakfast for a dollar each at a small café on the central square. The altitude is a mere 6000 feet and I sit in the square after breakfast and enjoy the sun for the first time since leaving Cartagena. I am surrounded by a gang of miniature shoeshine terrorists. My choice is based on a flash assessment of which boy needs the money most. The boy polishes and I discuss life and the importance of education with his companions.
Ming takes photographs.
Beyond Catamayo, the road climbs steeply through mountains to a summit at 8600 feet. The mountains are near-desert; the soil is pale yellow and powdery. This powdery sand coats the road surface at the corners. A biker would be in trouble if he took a corner too fast and had to brake. On some corners, the outer lane has slipped down the mountain. At other corners, the mountain has slipped and blocked the inner lane. The drop is forever. Meeting a truck is for serious adrenalin addicts. The Honda is light and manoeuvrable. I would hate to do the climb on a big road cruiser.
We reach the frontier. Customs and immigration officials are friendly and fast with the paperwork. We shake hands and thank them. Ecuador has been a pleasure. It is the cleanest country I have ridden through yet; the people are open and friendly; much of the poverty is hidden and I never felt even remotely at danger or under threat. For caviar, add a superb museum (Central Bank) and the chapel of the Rosary, Santo Domingo – both in Quito. And, of course, there are hedges and fells and snow on the peaks and proper, cone-shaped volcanoes. Yes, I’d return.